1978 ‘Les Rendez-vous d'Anna’ Directed by Chantal Akerman
Anna is a film director whose job takes her all over western Europe. In each place she either already has some intimate connection, or readily makes one. People seem drawn to her, but inevitably insist on sharing their inmost secrets and discontents with her, despite her obvious and profound lack of interest in these revelations. This does not deter Anna from continuing to meet people, and she genuinely connects with them occasionally, as when she sees her mother briefly in Brussels.
It's been about an hour since the final voice message played and this film closed and I sit here absolutely floored by the power of Chantal Akerman's cinema. Her work specifically in the 70s has become something of great importance to me personally. Her films in this period are formally rigorous, pushing the form into areas that I'm not sure had been approached yet and it's a shame that nobody remembers her for anything other than Jeanne Dielman.
Les Rendez-vous d’Anna is a deeply personal kind of autobiographical tale. Anna moves through cities showing her films having short encounters with strangers, friends and family and each scene is filled with a kind of unknowing sadness that seeps through. Anna is…
In New Orleans, everything is demarcated temporally as "before the storm" or "after the storm." The entire world is shaped and colored by Hurricane Katrina and the federal floods, and it comes up in unexpected ways, from casual references used to indicate when something happened to significant, simple explanations for why something is the way it is now. It's always there. In The Meetings of Anna, the watershed moment that seems to haunt all of the characters is apparently WWII.
It's there haunting everyone Anna meets, directly or indirectly, from lost loved ones to the economic results of the war. It has, over the 30 years between the end of it and the time of this film, altered countless lives,…
Chantal Akerman almost exclusively works on horizontal planes of space. Her compositions are known for their flat, minimalist staging, and she usually cuts with perpendicular angles to emphasize each shot's flatness. So one of the many surprising shots in Les Rendez-Vous d'Anna comes early. Anna leaves her hotel in Germany, and the camera tracks alongside her in a horizontal dolly. Suddenly, a flash of vertical motion interrupts the frame. It's a female maid, almost nonchalantly in the background, waving a sheet as she makes the bed. Another few moments later, another maid appears in the depth of the frame, also working. Akerman then cuts to a perpendicular frame, as Anna continues to walk down the hallway, and three more maids…
Les rendez-vous d'Anna is a formal curiosity first and a character piece second.
Revolving around a female film director traveling to the location of her newest film's screening, the film's premise carries the expectation of glamour, colorful characterizations and perhaps a cinema-based narrative. However, Chantal Akerman offers none of these things, actively avoiding what is normally seen in stories like this and radically shifting storytelling conventions. There are no sparkling movie stars working the room and the actual screening is never shown. Instead, the bulk of the film concerns itself with mundane activities and static action- lonely evenings in hotel rooms and lengthy train rides.
Anna, our protagonist, has five meetings throughout her trip. There's a sexual encounter with a…
The purity of cinema looking out windows walking down streets fills my heart, for love of Chantal.
Nobody seems to mention how funny this movie is.
Funny?
Yes. Funny.
I mean, you've got this stiff, somewhat impassive woman (the Anna of the title, played by Aurore Clément) who never fails to attract people who want to vomit up their lives, hangups, and worldviews all over her. She listens, but not actively. She's not big on affirmations or engaged response. Mostly she stares into the middle distance—receiving their communications, albeit unaffectedly.
Anna could also be characterized as mechanical, and this is another source of comedy. She occasionally recites mundane exposition to random people, like the hotel front desk clerk or some person on the other end of a phone conversation. But unlike her other interlocutors, her dialogue is…
Sucks being in demand
Way more conventional than Akerman's previous (if you could believe that) and unlike them THE MEETINGS OF ANNA has some flab - it's probably all autobiographical, but it doesn't make uninteresting characters interesting, or more "true" - but stylistically the movie is transcendental; through her meetings, and the way she remains silent, Akerman brilliantly pinpoints Anna, making her the real focus of our attention; Akerman weaves this focus into a more and more depressing notion towards the end, where she perfeclty captures the nature of a panic attack - when the world keeps flowing in and you momentarily forget to shield yourself and eventually just have to lay there in horror - and we not only understand but feel Anna's profound sense of loneliness.
It's great cinema of empathy, and Akerman finds a way to use time, static camera angles and space(s) in a way I have never seen before.
Su carácter esencialmente autobiográfico, lo mejor y lo peor del cine de esta mujer.
Has somebody understood female desolation as genuinely as Chantal Akerman? Honestly, I highly doubt it.
At least in my viewings of her work, Chantal Akerman seems to be the actress/writer/director who seems the most human to me. Her characters are human, flawed, distant, walled-up and protected just like anyone confronting the lunacies of today. If anything, her excellent film in The Criterion Collection's Eclipse Series, 'Chantal Akerman in the Seventies', exemplifies the discordant dystopia of real people trying to make it in today's world far more realistically and accurately than any science fiction from then could have even thought to be. Of course, she had to die before her time, taking her life, exhausted of any other conceivable possibility.
I had the good fortune, and the foresight, being Canadian and 17, to travel by myself,…
chantal akerman's work in the seventies is out of this world and somewhat overlooked...this felt very personal and it's maybe too minimalistic for my liking but i don't think it would be this powerful if it had been different...
52 Films by Women 2016, #32/52.
Not as powerful in-the-moment for me as Jeanne Dielman or Je Tu Il Elle, but like all of Akerman's films, one to take up mental real estate (already starting to swirl and cloud round in there a few minutes after finishing). Visually striking as always, with Akerman creating the equally beautiful and drab vistas she excels at, and Clément makes for a quietly captivating and compelling stand-in. As always with her films, last shot is a doozy.
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